Sword and Shield
by TheAllPowerfulOz
Summary: A Gift Fic for Fareeq as homage to Perfectly Stupid Ideas. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

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_Okay, **Fareeq's** Perfectly Stupid Ideas is fan-freakin-tastic and I love eeeeet! _

_The madness and struggle are written so beautifully, and the love scenes are very tastefully done! *Not to mention HAWT* _

_Go read that fic! OZ commands it! *glares until you read it and leave a nice comment*_

_Seriously, that fic deserves more comments than its getting. It's tragic how few it has._

_DOOOO EEEEEETTTT NOOOOOOOOOWWWW! *insert excessive exclamation points here*_

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**Chapter 1; The Eye in the Dark**

He paced like an animal. Back and forth, back and forth dizzyingly, perpetually, as if he was no longer capable of feeling tired, no longer needed sleep, no longer felt anything but that inhuman, otherworldly thrum beneath his skin.

He spoke of it— No, 'speak' was too dim a word… He snarled it.

Words tumbling out at sharp angles between red teeth…

There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips, like a mountain beast lashing out for prey and disappearing again before it believed it had been seen.

Malik sat there staring at him thinking—even while he tried to tell himself he needed to listen, needed to know what Altair was saying because it was important— that the young Master needed to eat something.

A week now of these visits and there was still food rotting in the corner from that first day Malik had found him lying there as if dieing, pupils wide, body cold, pale and trembling, blood staining his torn clothes but not a wound to be found.

There was something wrong with Altair, but he didn't really know, or want to accept what he'd been told, so he just sat there, hand on his knee… and listened.

It was all he could do.

Watch, worry, wonder… and listen.

He watched Altair pace, wearing a groove in the floor.

He worried about the bloody sore looking places at the edges of Altair's mouth… they looked larger than they had been the day before, stretching farther and farther across his cheeks, like an ugly mockery of a smile… He needed to eat something, he was malnourished, his clothes were too loose and bruises shaped like teeth were forming on his hands, as if he'd been clawing inside his mouth to force himself to vomit… Vomit, there had been a lot of that too, Altair tried to hide it but Malik knew.

He wondered why Altair's breathing had changed and become almost frantic, why he found the hiss of it in and out of the other man's throat so… so sexual.

Malik didn't know what it was truthfully, only that while Altair was pacing his breath had reached that urgent, wanting pitch. And his hands had begun to scrape over his head, down his chest and up the insides of his thighs to emphasize his misery and despair, as if his very skin itched and burned and he wished to tear it in long bloody strips from his body.

He seemed to be solid, chaotic motion, everything moving, twisting, scratching, sliding…

_There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips…_

It was so very sexual. So very alluring—

That was until he realized Altair had stopped talking and was hunched, stomping back and forth with one hand over his mouth, the other wrapped tightly around his middle, whimpering and whining with tears rolling down his face.

"What is it?"

But Altair didn't reply, just whined loudly, the desperate sound of a man who'd lost all his patience with something and had decided to take brash, more often than not _reckless_, action, and plunged fingers into his mouth, feeling around with a single minded look of pain in his eyes. He seemed to claw around in there beside his tongue for a moment before his nails seized on something and _pulled…_

Malik's whole body shivered and his fingers tightened on his knee in disgust, jaws creaking as they clamped together.

The muscles in Altair's wrist twitched and his fingers slid free, a bloody rope following them out of his mouth, sliding out to drip and stain his hood.

He released a sound, somewhere between agony and bliss and held his pinched fingers up before his squinted eyes, staring at the spiked thing pinched between them…

It wasn't until Altair let his hand droop to his side and the thing fell to hit the dirt that Malik realized it was one of Altair's molars, bloody and still clinging to a bit of muscle and nerve tissue. He recoiled, staring down at it with his nose wrinkled up, fighting nausea.

Altair stood there staring at it curiously, lips parted, gore dripping from the center of his lower lip, gathering in the corners of his mouth.

He didn't blink, just turned and stared at Malik, his eyes somehow feral, nostrils flared…

He was terribly, eerily still for a long while, and Malik felt an unnatural pressure building on his chest, as if some invisible spirit were sitting on him, trying to sink down and find a home for itself in his very core. His vision shrank in at the edges and he slapped his hand upward, finding it suddenly flat in the middle of Altair's chest and for a moment he thought he was touching something long since dead and rotting.

When had Altair moved?

The next instant Altair was gone…

Malik stared, shocked, fear so potent and real he felt like a child again. The cave was empty except that little fire he'd built and that pressure like presence that made him think he was being watched from somewhere far above him in the blackness.

He fled.

The whole of the next day and night he kept a knife within his reach.

It was two nights before he could go back, and when he did Altair was not there, but scattered amid the frantic footprints and stamped out ashes he found nine more bony protrusions and black, crusty clots of blood and rotting flesh.

He counted in his head… A man only had, on average thirty-two teeth… Altair had only thirty-one to begin with, had had two removed by a surgeon years ago and two broken out in a fight… That left twenty-seven… Now ten were gone in a matter of three days? Looking to have been torn out by the pressure of two fingers?

He shivered and searched the cave, walking as far back as he could calling out before he lost the light of the day and could travel no further. He stood there, on that borderline between hellish blackness and the small shape of daylight behind him for a long while, staring trying to make his eyes penetrate the gloom.

He could feel something, far back in there… watching him.

He likened it first to an animal… but there was something too intelligent about its gaze… something too human, even in its inhumanity.

He called out, once, twice, three times…

Somewhere far back in the cave farther than he could see, the echo of a rock tumbling from some lofty perch echoed out at him.

The eerie silence that followed made Malik feel very small and vulnerable.

There was something big back there… something big and dark that would grab him before he even saw it.

It would strike faster than any blade, faster than any disease. What resided back, far back in this cave was nothing to be trifled with… It flew upon Death's very wings.

He retreated… quickly.

He did not run away. He was not a child and he did not run from the dark. No… He strode quickly, with purpose.

The next morning Malik woke to angry fists pounding on the door to his chambers and somewhere in the world outside his window there were screams.

He worried that there had been an attack, that the fortress was being overrun and he leapt to his feet, sword in hand…

What he found down stairs, instead, was something even more ugly and unexpected.

A woman, collapsed on her knees over a sheet draped body… Her only son. Nearing fifteen years. A mute who had been watching the family's lone surviving goat after the other two had been dragged away and mauled by wolves.

Malik crouched and peered beneath the sheet, breath held from the stink… And found himself staring down at what could only fundamentally be called a human corpse.

The boy's face was gone, only a bony skull, licked clean… Deep swooping grooves were carved into the bone, and both eyes had been plucked cleanly from their sockets… like grapes.

His skeleton was incomplete, the left arm and three ribs gone, the remaining bones showing signs of being gnawed upon. And the flesh of the boy's chest and stomach and been stripped back, peeled away and eaten… Amid the gory mush still residing in his ruined belly Malik spied something foreign… Something that shouldn't be there.

He lifted his eyes again, and then his gaze flipped back quickly in horror, because the boy's grinning eerie skull still had all of his teeth… And that was most definitely a human tooth amid the remains of his liver.

The deceased child's cousin, who had been staying in the field with the unfortunate boy that night, a novice nearing the time of his first trial, was pale but his dark eyes were very very clear.

Malik stood and brushed the sand from his knees, let his breath out in a hiss and gave the three men a nod. Wordless permission to move the body to a more secluded location to be properly washed for burial, a place the dead boy's mother could mourn him without interruption.

Malik's hand landed on the novice's shoulder and he gave a firm, directional squeeze, guiding him just into the entryway of the fortress, a cave like room hidden in deep shadow and highlighted with white sunlight reflecting off the sand and stone in the courtyard. A few people milled around there to escape the heat, walking back and forth on their way somewhere, in and out and away while he and the boy blended in to the shadows. Voices hushed but firm.

"What did you see?"

And the boy spoke, softly, but very clearly in much detail…

"It looked like a man… but not… His eyes glowed like coals in a fire, and he…IT—it moved like a fog. Almost too fast to be seen." He swallowed as if he might be sick and his lips rolled back from his teeth, finger rigid as it pointed. "They were sharp, like blades. It tore into him without making a sound… As if it didn't even notice I was there… I didn't know what it was at first, a demon maybe… A monster. But it-i-it…It ate his eyes… I remember the blood running off its chin e-even as he tried to scream, how it licked him clean—licked its hands clean."

"Did you try to fight it from him?"

"Yes… I hit it with my knives." He indicated the empty sheathes along his stained belt. "It fled… B-but I could still feel it out there until nearly dawn— watching me."

Malik didn't leave the fortress that night… He stood high on the tower wall and stared outward past the village and deep into the darkness.

The world hummed beneath his feet, alive… And he could feel some invisible threat out there before him. Like that blackness he'd sensed at the back of the cave—but much too near for comfort.

He didn't sleep that night, and the next morning he found the novice and promised to find the beast that had killed his cousin and destroy it.

That night Altair was waiting for him, a little fire built and he was reclining almost sleepily on the ground with his arms folded beneath his head.

His outer tunic was missing, and all he wore were his pants loose and lightly stained on the knees and thighs.

"Where are your clothes?"

Altair raised his head, eyes clear, but eerily bright. "They were covered in sick and filth… I found a spring back there—" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, "—so I washed them."

Malik didn't sit, just spoke in a voice that he tried to make sound sincere; "A spring? Really?"

Altair nodded and waved, eyes turning back to the flames; "Yes, just back there over the rocks. It's quite pretty. Would make a very nice hide away if one should be needed."

Malik did sit then, carefully, on a rock as far from Altair across the fire as he could manage without seeming suspicious. "You look well."

Which he did. The growing sores at the edges of his lips were gone, and his skin had cleared. No more bruises and reddened irritated places on his jaws.

He didn't look like he'd been sick for the better part of two weeks.

"Whatever was in that tonic you brought me last helped, thank you."

Malik hummed, eyes locked on the shining white in Altair's mouth…

_Teeth… He's still got all his teeth._

"It wasn't the plague then I suppose."

Altair chuckled, such a warm, inviting sound that for a moment Malik let his guard down… just a moment…

But it was long enough to damn him.

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"Where are those boys going?"

His nose wrinkled, peering out the window toward the courtyard where a group of five boys were gathered, tightening belts and harnesses, going over the edges of blades with whetstones.

Malik recognized only two of them, and after that fact registered he knew exactly what they were doing, and why the largest boy had a young lamb with him. Although why that large boy looked on the verge of tears, holding the lamb to his chest as one might do a babe was beyond Malik's realm of thought at the moment.

"They're going to take the lamb out to the field where the attack occurred and try to lure the beast toward them… Then they plan to kill it."

Malik nodded warily and turned back to his work.

By morning the boys in the pasture were exhausted, and happily—for Hammad at least—the lamb was still alive, looking sleepy and bleating pathetically for its mother.

For almost two weeks it went on like this every night. Malik watched them come and go from his study window. His brows creased with worry.

Maybe the Novice had been mistaken and it was only a common wolf to attack and kill his cousin. That was a comforting thought, Malik liked that, it was less complicated than his other thoughts and therefore easier to accept.

So, he tried to ignore the people of the village who came to him complaining of missing sheep and goats. Tried to ignore it when a horse went missing, because for a week afterward everything was still and he could breathe a sigh of relief…

That was until the girl disappeared…

She was nearing four years old, just a baby in Malik's eyes… she'd been by her elder brother's side one minute, then her little fingers had slid so gently from his hand and when he turned to catch them again she had vanished.

Two days later her left foot was found near one of the old wells to the west, the flesh had been neatly, almost delicately eaten from each of her little toes, and a bite had been taken from her heel…

The most unearthly thing though, was that no flies would go near it…

Two days later Hammad's lamb was stolen cleanly away… Hammad had nothing to say because all that was found of him was a gory disturbed place in the grass and a gnawed, bloody hand still wearing his ring.

Malik forbade the Novices from leaving the keep at night, chastising them, asking in a low, cold voice how a boy as large as Hammad and as loud could be killed and dragged away without their knowledge. Nobody died silently, no matter what you may think.

That night he spent lying in his bed, staring upward at the ceiling wondering what thousand horrors could be lurking in the darkness just outside his window.

He left his bed, shrugging on his coat over his bare chest, lit a lamp and strode carefully, more aware of the blackness of the night than he ever had been before in his adult life. It seemed a living thing, swallowing up the light of flame and spirit like this faceless monster that plagued his village.

He found a ledger, just a small, rather poorly made thing that some novice or another would carry with him, and often left absentmindedly. None of the pages had been written on, so he pocketed it, sat his lamp on the nearest desk and began to pour through the shelved books. Books in languages he could barely understand, cryptic confusing passages, descriptions of ancient beasts that were said to haunt the endless forests of the Brittans. Fell beasts and fire wyrms that devoured ash and fed on the bodies and souls of young virgins. Demons who lived in the earth and tore apart babes and children as a wolf pack would rip apart a lamb.

He made notes and hypothesis. Used the charred end of a reed to sketch what the novice had said the… the thing looked like.

He found himself shortening the creatures limbs, very wolf like with a long snout of sharp teeth and pointed ears… He'd heard Greeks and a few Christians talk about such a creature, that a man in league with the devil would become a wolf in the night. That during the day he would remain as a man, only detectable by hair on his palms and the length of his fingers. How the only way to kill such a creature was to take off his head and burn his heart…

It sounded ludicrous to Malik, insane that this could be anything other than a rabid wolf… or perhaps some poor man who'd gone mad.

There had to be a logical explanation… There just had to.

The next three days he poured over his notes, questioned and requestioned the novice who had witnessed his cousin's death.

The young man became so enraged at the constant, almost angry sounding interrogation that he slammed his hands down on the table.

Malik felt his hand twitch toward his blade. He'd spent the better part of a week now obsessed with finding some inconsistency in the boy's story. Some little something he could use to convince himself that this had all been a damned wolf pack roaming the area and he could stop worrying himself over stupid tales of monsters that only existed in the minds of ignorant people and children.

But… The boy's story did not waver in the slightest. His descriptions vivid and too clear to be anything but authentic.

"Why are you still questioning me! This thing is out there! It strikes without mercy or discrimination and instead of allowing us to seek it out and destroy it you have us cowering in our beds with the windows and doors barred and knives under our pillows!"

"Whatever it is, beast or man or demon, it is dangerous, and until it can be identified I will not allow any more lives to be wasted recklessly looking for it!"

The boy slammed his fists onto the table again but said nothing more as he stomped heavily from the room.

Any other day Malik would have beaten the insolence out of him, but the dread that this thing wasn't something that could be logically explained had begun to settle like a leaded weight in the pit of his stomach.

The boy did have a point… Waiting for it to strike again in hopes of catching sight of it was pointless. Hiding and cowering from it, allowing it to rule over the whole fortress and everyone within it made them absolutely powerless against any number of other assaults.

Sleepless again, feeling sick and exhausted from the noise in his head, Malik made a decision.

He sat out alone the next morning long before dawn.

Almost a week now without an attack the beast, if it was still alive, would be hungry. It would be near, lurking in shadows and watching.

Malik would need help if he were going to find this thing… But the fact Altair had not returned to the fortress yet worried him.

He had seemed healed the last time they'd spoken, healed enough for his body to cling with an almost inhuman strength and his voice to ring out in the night like a storm gale… He should have returned, and had Malik not been so worried about other things, and had he not been trying to ignore that sick not-quite-right feeling in his stomach when he thought of Altair, he might have allowed himself to worry about the other man's absence.

As it was, for some strange reason he couldn't name or explain, maybe it was lingering anger and that sour sense of betrayal, or the sadness and bitterness he felt… It seemed more likely than some strange sixth sense like Altair had spoken of weeks before while he'd been ranting and clawing at himself.

_'The smell… fuck—the smell.' He inhaled deeply through flared nostrils, his pupils wide and dark. 'it's rot and filth and ancient damp… It has color! I breathe and I can see it moving through the air! I-I-I can feel it in my mind… burning—burning always.' He clutched at his stomach and bent almost double, teeth red where they were bared at the floor, wetness glittering on his cheeks—_

_There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips…_

The sky was just beginning to redden at the edges when he reached the caves, a gaping stony mouth appearing out of the ground like the very blackest maw of hell.

There was no sign of a fire, no sign of a struggle, or any indication that Altair was there at all.

Malik, inwardly, was not surprised… At the moment he felt distinctly chilled, every little hair on his body alive and standing on end.

He sat on a rock, just outside the cave and held his torch between his feet while he lit it, then sat there holding it for a long while, listening to the wind moan quietly through the pit.

He remembered, as a child, once being perfectly horrified of the darkness. That fear had long since faded away… but it resurfaced now with a vengeance. Clawing the back of his mind and the depth of his chest.

He didn't want to believe it… Didn't want to think it was possible, forget probable.

_He still has all his teeth… I saw them, they were not sharp, they were just his teeth. What that boy described was not human, and Altair is very much human. I know that for a fact. I've seen him bleed—I've _made_ him bleed. _

_He still has all his teeth… _

He forced himself up, the wind pushing against his front, as if trying to warn him of what may lie beyond.

He took a deep breath… and pushed on.

The rocks and stones and dirt of the cave around him glowed in the firelight. Every so often he saw disturbance in the dust… What looked like a scuff, or a footprint.

The world slanted steadily downward and back into the earth, so far he could only identify the direction because the mouth of the cave was a distant dimly lighted shape behind him.

He almost tripped twice in something slick, but when he held the torch down to inspect it all he saw was the same dark moisture that covered everything about one-hundred meters into the cave. What he had begun to notice was how terribly deep this cave was… How parts of the walls looked to have, at one time, been carved into. It would only come to him later that this must be the remains of some ancient mine or something of the sort.

The darkness smelled damp and musty, like old rotting earth and something long sense dead that had turned to dust hundreds of years ago, but the scent of its decay had yet to dissipate—

And then something crunched beneath his boot and he went deathly still, body tense, staring out into the abyss for a ten count before he rocked slowly back a step, swallowed thickly, and peered down at what he'd stepped on.

At first it looked like, maybe the skull of some old dead rat… but as he bent to inspect it, to chastise himself that all the danger here was oversized rodents, he realized it was not a rat's skull… but was actually that of a small cat… still young enough to be called a kitten… And there was a smattering of gray fur around as well.

_Rats,_ he told himself once more.

_It was separated from its mother and rats got it—_

Something twinkled like light off a coin somewhere high to his empty left sleeve and Malik's head snapped up, body rotating on the balls of his feet, torch brandished before him like a knife. He shouted in surprise and anger at being startled and the twinkling was gone…

But that oppressive presence he'd been hyper aware of was back. A solid smothering wall of it now instead of the dull aching pressure it had been before. He felt drowned by it, overwhelmed…

He was being watched…

He was being _hunted._

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	2. Chapter 2

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**Chapter 2; Animal  
**

The heartbeat was constant, quick, thundering. His vision sharpened and waned along with it like a pulse, everything becoming stark and startlingly visible with every thump.

At that moment the when of this, that elusive moment in time where his senses split, was lost. He didn't even understand really why he hadn't always felt this way. This slick thrill through every vein every nerve. Running up and down his back and through every limb and tendon like liquid fire.

His senses lit up the darkness and within them he was god.

The figure advanced slowly. Wide black eyes darting left and right, squinting, glaring, staring, flame aloft.

The smell was intoxicating. Exactly like the others… but something, something small and seemingly insignificant at the moment, twitched and writhed and fought at the back of his mind.

There was more than smell in this place, nothing this potent could be simply and easily classified or experienced by only one part of the whole. It was as if every inch of him had turned into one big amalgamation of sensory input. A giant, pulsing taste bud or something. The air was alive with scent. So thick and overwhelming it had become a taste he could capture through his skin, through his eyes, through the ends of his hair. It clung there like mist, or dew on grass blades. Something visible and physical he could have touched and devoured.

The figured glowed.

All living things glowed. Shone with that powerful, unforgivably potent force that sustained him.

And slowly, as he hovered just out of the figure's range of sight, he began to find familiarity in his thoughts. A little niggling voice eating away at his concentration, or lack there of, like a maggot boring through a hunk of rotten meat. Familiarity to the numbness that stole over him during the act, when he—

He remembered watching the light flow over his fingers in the blackness, eerie how it hovered in and around it like a halo, as if the world around it became infused with its power. Fingers warm and cold and wet, painting his face with it, rubbing it over his arms and chest and just sitting there under the stars feeling his skin tingle… licking it from his fingers and lips, the skin splitting back toward his ears like wet paper… as his muscles just seemed to push and push and push his jaws apart, past the possibilities of his flesh and into something agonizing and unholy. The hunger bursting within him like a molten chunk of the sun had fallen and taken residence in his body—

He'd gone mad with it, and in that moment ceased to exist. Taken over by something that was not of his world, nor any of the others—

That flicker of li_fe_ght, the smell of heat and sweat… eyes open and wide, mouth screaming and soundless, thudding fists on his chest and face and back.

_—confusionneedHUNGER—_

The satisfying pop of flesh as teeth sank home, the gush—the tang against his tongue. The heat and force within it that made his own flesh glow, that pumped life into him that stole the unbearable chill from his bones and the emptiness from his mind.

Prey.

Salvation.

Here, he was god—

The flicker stole his attention.

Sound bouncing off the walls and stones. So faint he could barely see it. So faint the Figure never would have noticed.

A horse—_bitterslimydespaironmytongue—_bearing a stranger in gray clothes…

Two waves of scent…

_Hotfreshyoungalivewarm… so warm._

And a slick tightening of his muscles, memory, just flashes, images, emotions, sensation and garbled sound and tastes and pulsing colors.

The repetitive thud of sharp silvery pain in his back and side, turning to see that stranger standing there, screeching at him and the glint of a knife arching toward him… The hot streak of pain as he'd caught it midair, squeezing it in his fist and the wide eyes the slow fade of colors from the one who'd thrown it…

The uncomfortable writhing in the back of his mind stilled as the focus slipped to the stranger, to the prey… The figure with the torch forgotten, he moved.

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Malik felt his heart hammering behind his ribs, against his lungs as if it intended to rob him of his breath as well as his wits.

It wasn't that he could hear the thing moving, whatever it was with the reflective eyes. It was that he felt its presence. That unnatural pressure in his chest was choking him, and he could feel the center of it like a great lidless eye focused on him. When he moved, it followed. When he held up his torch, it wasn't afraid, just stayed back in the darkness to hide its presence. But Malik had a feeling that even if this thing had been fully visible he'd have been defenseless against it. Whatever had taken up residence in this cave was the reason Altair was missing. And if his fears were correct, it had also been the root of his village's problems.

He had an image in his head, some half wolf, half man creature like described in the books he'd found. He could almost see it out there in the blackness staring… waiting. Growing closer and more powerful by the second.

It was dangerous… It had to be stopped. Even if it killed him too, Malik knew that this-this whatever it was, had to be sto—

And he felt that lidless eye of crushing sensation pass somewhere off to his left. Felt it growing closer…

_It's trying to get behind me. Trying to cut off my means of escape, force me deeper into this damned cave!_

He brandished his torch at where he could feel the beast was, as if it were some strange sixth sense that led him, maybe even highlighting a dot in the gloom where the pupil of the 'eye' was.

"Show yourself." The words came out in a distressed growl and he bared his teeth as the sound echoed back in the abyss, and out of anger and fear contorted his face and shouted it at the walls; "Show yourself!"

A rock tumbled somewhere behind him and he heard a sound, a startled, unsteady grunt. And when Malik whirled on it, teeth bared as if he himself had become part monster, he saw a dim, lighter shape between himself and mouth of the cave, so small now, lost in the twists and turns of the passageways, it appeared only a dim glow.

He recognized a cowl and tunic, a hand up pushing back the peak of a hood and a stance that was uncomfortable and wary. For a moment he thought it was Altair and relief burst in his chest because that meant whatever was in the cave was definitely not—

But the figure had moved into the light now and disappointment left a bitter taste in the back of Malik's throat. Those were novice grays… Familiar novice greys.

"Damn you, Asa!" he snarled it, stomping toward the boy and aiming a kick at him in his displeasure. "You shouldn't have come! You little FOOL! You have no idea what trouble you've caused me—"

The boy bowed his head but his stance and expression were defensive.

Malik kept shouting at him; "You have no business here! I can't watch you like an infant and destroy this thing. GO, Go back to the village and STAY there—"

"It killed my cousin! You can not deny me the right—"

"You are a novice!" He spat the word, nose wrinkled up; "This thing has killed someone much larger and stronger than you. It would take you in one swipe!" He didn't know, in that moment, if he'd meant Hammad and his lamb, or if…

"But—"

"GO!" The word echoed back and back and back into the dark and seemed to be swallowed abruptly by that something Malik could feel watching—hunting them. "Go and count yourself lucky that I didn't beat you to death right here for your insolence! I am Master here and you will do as I say!"

The boy looked on the verge of tears, knuckles white where they gripped the hilt of his sword. Malik could almost hear his thoughts, hear the curses the boy wanted to throw at him. The insults and vengeful rage that had been denied him.

_You're just a cripple, what makes you think you'll be able to kill it if men with both arms at their disposal could not?_

But the boy held his tongue, and the fact he did look somewhat cowed drummed up some of Malik's courage he thought left nearer to the cave's entrance, along with the frayed remains of his nerves.

And when Malik turned his chest bumped flat against another chest, his nose into a cold, wet… bloody chin.

It was so abrupt, so without warning Malik's mouth dropped open and he inhaled sharply in shock.

The smell clung to the back of his throat and the insides of his lungs like disease. Cloying and permeating like rain through clothes.

It was a dark scent, deep and all encompassing, and it smelled worse than anything he'd ever had the misfortune to have within sniffing distance.

He was reminded of his novice days, and finding a cat picked to death by vultures lying in the path. It had been there days already, and a thick blanket of writhing white and yellow maggots covered it, squirming about in worm like ecstasy, flies and bugs crawling in and out of its mouth, eyes just empty black pus riddled holes in its skull. Skin perforated, body bloated _smelly-stinky-rotting-**DEATH!**_

He saw teeth, right before his eyes. Out of focus, tall, long… sharp like knives—rows of them visible in an ugly caricature of a grin that spread from ear to ear, skin torn and rotted away in blackened, dripping, dangling, gory bits. A few tendons were still connected, frayed looking like old rope, pale and bloodless, ashy grey and greenish, stained and falsely colored by blood.

It was an ugly nightmarish vision… And worse yet, when he stumbled back half a step, a cold inhumanly strong hand tangling in the front of his robe, his eyes wide and blank with terror, Malik recognized the face below the massacre. Recognized it, had watched it smile, frown, laugh, cry out in ecstasy and relax in peaceful slumber—had once loved it.

It happened in half a breath, half a second. That hand tangled in his clothes, and he felt pulled, yanked—THROWN through the air as if he were as small and ineffectual as a ruined bit of cloth.

He sailed high through the air, nauseous as the world arched and spun and came loose from its axis. Tumbling down toward the rocks, his torch still clenched tightly in his fist—

He hit so hard that for a second everything went black and only focused again when he forced himself to inhale. A gasping, wheezing noise as air was sucked back into his empty chest—

He couldn't move. A rock had tumbled from its perch when he'd struck the wall and bounced off like so much balled string, and landed across his right leg. As his senses swam back he heard the screaming. Not something mindless and filled with fear, as he'd heard young boys do when faced with something from their nightmares… This sound had no soul. It was a scream because there was nothing left to do. A scream so utterly hopeless and damned it almost froze Malik's blood.

He lifted himself, head swimming and turned toward the noise, groping for his torch—

There was something wet within the screaming, like a drowning man fighting for breath amid his watery flailing… A hungry almost—almost gobbling noise like an angry starved dog or an amassment of ravenous wolves fighting over a morsel of food. An ugly animalistic noise that cut right through Malik's head and drove him a little mad.

He didn't know what was worse, actually seeing it, or the fact that his torch cast oversized, graphic, black shadows against the smooth carved wall.

He couldn't understand what he was seeing, this—this MONSTER pinning the boy to the floor, one hand around his throat, squeezing off his wails, face pressed into the ruined front of the novice's chest, teeth and free hand ripping and pulling, jaws moving, chewing, crushing bone and flesh and organs without discrimination… DEVOURING everything, and all the while Asa's face was twisted into an expression that had become something ugly and almost bliss like as he bled out onto the floor and into this THING feeding on him.

His voice was nothing but wet gasping now, red spilling from his nose and the corners of his mouth in thick bright ribbons, his short, torn sash splayed out to either side of him in the gore, robes shredded.

Malik didn't know how long it lasted, too hellishly long, in his head he was wishing, praying that the boy would just die because he could no longer imagine what kind of pain—

And those reflective coin eyes appeared out of the blackness behind a saturated hood. Visible only as that gaping, bloody maw of sharp… he guessed they would still be considered teeth.

There was nothing human about it. Even though it wore a familiar face, walked with a familiar gait, there was nothing human about it.

It slunk forward like a fog, seeming to just slither and BE closer without movement, sliding over him like a lover.

Had he been able to do anything other than stare with his eyes wide and his teeth ground together like a fence in his mouth, too shocked and frightened to scream, he would have possibly felt somehow violated that what he was seeing, what he was experiencing was so much different than everything he'd ever been taught or thought he'd known.

The torchlight, where it guttered and flicked on the wet earth, just out of his grip cast grotesque fluttering shadows across the monster's familiar face. Light played on and through the bloody rent flesh on each cheek, glinting and shining on bloody tongue and red pointed teeth, mountains of them set back all the way to the throat in that gaping, unnatural… hideous cave of a mouth.

The breath that came out at slow, creeping intervals was cold, fetid and smelled like the air released by dead horses left to rot in the sun.

Though it moved, crept and slithered along with unnatural speed and slowness. Though it moved and breathed and blinked and—and _ate_, the chill the creature exuded was ungodly. It sunk into Malik where they touched and bored its way to the bone like infection. It ate away at him, even as he lie there, trapped, unable to move, that—that THING practically lying on top of him. Eyes keen and deadly and inhuman.

He wanted to shut his eyes. Wanted to unsee this beast parading about in Altair's skin… he wanted to snuff it out like a child's sketch in the dirt rubbed away by the sole of his boot. He wanted to make this thing not exist. Wanted it simply _gone…_ He wanted to look in those eyes and see Altair, not something hungry. Not something that had just killed and devoured a boy before his very eyes.

Everything was still but that breathing and the thunder of Malik's heart in his ears. It was almost as if the thing could hear it as well as its eyes slipped from Malik's face to the front of his robes. Bloody sticky, ruined hands pawing there with unnatural ease and tearing the fabric clean in two all the way to his waist.

It leaned close and Malik knew, with unerring certainty in that moment, that he was about to die. And it was not for the fear of death that he broke his vow of silence and whimpered, it was the knowledge that when Altair returned to himself, Malik was sure that he would eventually he was too stubborn to be snuffed out so easily, he would see what had happened… would know.

He feared leaving the order without a leader. Feared the chaos that would follow.

That head bent, lowered and Malik could feel the tip of its nose run the length of his torso, from his crotch all the way up and bury itself behind his right ear.

He felt violated simply by that light touch. Felt sick to his stomach and in some way tainted by it. He could see, so clearly in his mind that gaping wound of a mouth opening and taking the whole of his throat in at once, biting down… He imagined the pop of teeth sinking in. The fire of pain and the tightening of muscles in his body as he tried—futilely—to fight it off. He imagined what death would feel like and prayed only that it was swift because watching himself be eaten bit by bit would drive his soul mad, and he feared meeting his maker in such a state.

The cold, icy nose behind his ear pressed in harder, breath slow and deep like an approaching storm. Seeming to go in and in and in and in unendingly. He could feel the impossibly sharp points of all those teeth on his skin, that cold breath and wetness of the dead boy's blood and drippy ropes of drool.

Fear seemed like too pale a word compared to what he felt at that moment. In that instant he ceased to exist. Everything that made him who he was had been replaced by blind and all consuming terror.

This was the end…

That chilled weight was settled atop him with such ugly familiarity, breath going in and in and in and in and in and silence. Teeth poised, scraping gently, threateningly…

Malik just stared at the flame of his torch and waited…

But—

Nothing moved.

Was the creature hesitating? Was it playing with him? Or was it just trying to savor its next meal…

Malik moved, oh so slowly, knowing that the odds were not stacked in his favor, but refusing to go down without a fight. He slid his dagger from the sheathe on his right thigh, heart hammering, breath caught in the cage of his chest… and pressed the sharp tip to the side of the monster's throat.

That endless in and in and in and in and in breath halted and the silence was oppressive, gold eyes shone like new coins in the very corner of Malik's vision, even as he fought with all his strength to not tremble. Sweat beading on his face and brow, nausea and faintness churning the acid in his stomach, determination baring his teeth and curling his brows.

It was a slight thing, a shift… And some small corner of the beast's eye darkened, the pupil bouncing back and forth large and small large and small large and small like the ripples in a bottomless well.

He felt the words breathed into his neck, felt teeth, so eager and hungry pressing into the flesh of his throat—but hesitating.

"Do it…"

His hand gave a single shake, only one, then his grip steadied.

"Do it."

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End file.
